The career of American Jewish literature would seem to have reached a turning point. Over the past three decades, Jewish writers have made their way into the mainstream of American fiction, and have now been canonized in university curricula. A swell of anthologies, secondary studies, and courses is evidence of a success achieved and acknowledged—a success not only of individual writers admired for their particular talents, but of what is generally seen as an entire cultural movement or school. Despite an occasional objection (like that of the late Philip Rahv) to “the ignorant and even malicious idea that such a school exists,” no one would seriously deny that the years since the end of World War II have been fat ones for American Jewish writing, and few would any longer deny that those years seem to be coming to an end. But where some critics see an imminent decline of the genre as a whole, others anticipate spirited new developments.
Certainly a case can be made for the exhaustion of an “American Jewish” approach or an “American Jewish” subject matter. The twin themes of marginality and victimization, which have come to be associated in Western literature with the Jew, have been brought to maturity in this country in the work of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, and it is questionable how much longer they can profitably serve. The Jewish male as son and would-be lover has become a stock literary fixture—John Updike’s parody of the type in Bech is a gentle hint that even the goy has the formula, so enough already. Where it once required an act of courage for a serious Jewish writer to risk parochialism by creating a distinctively Jewish character, the fact that Jewishness is now in literary fashion means that anyone can invoke it as a shorthand for signification, what Marcus Klein calls “a kind of strawberry mark, something that must mean something because it is celebrated in literature.”
The attenuated Jewishness that has begun showing up in literature has its obvious source in the culture at large. As American Jews exhibit fewer identifying characteristics, the novelist of manners finds it harder to establish that bit of ethnic specificity, of local color, that will distinguish his work. Echoes of Yiddish grow fainter as actual speakers of the language withdraw into old age or hasidic ghettos. It was once possible for a Jewish writer to write a “Jewish” book simply as a result of having lived in certain sections of Chicago or New York. One had inherited, as the novelist Norma Rosen has put it, a trust fund: “Without even trying, one had certain speech rhythms . . . , colloquialisms that were inherently funny, relationships always good for cutting down by wit.” Nowadays, there is nothing much in the speech or appearance of the average Jew to distinguish him from any other American, and fewer of those cultural features which critics have grown accustomed to identifying as “Jewish.”
The combined effect of literary saturation and a diluted Jewish culture has prompted some critics to prophesy the end of the Jewish movement in American writing. American Jewish literature, they say, derives its strength from the peculiar tension of the Jew who is native to two cultures while fully at home in neither; hence, the more fully the Jew becomes integrated into the larger culture, the less the tension and the fewer the creative energies generated by it. Jews, of course, will continue to write, but they will have lost the cutting edge of their hyphenated identity.
As if in partial confirmation of this view, some recent fiction by established American Jewish novelists would seem to offer striking examples of just such a movement of “assimilation,” and to call into serious question the appropriateness of the ethnic label even for those who have worn it the longest. Saul Bellow has long objected to being enshrined (with Roth and Malamud) in a Jewish triumvirate; his most recent novel, Humboldt’s Gift, with its un-Jewish narrator Charlie Citrine and its not-particularly-Jewish Humboldt (modeled after the American Jewish poet Delmore Schwartz), provides grounds for taking his protest to heart. An even more startling example of de-Judaization is Philip Roth’s “true story” of Peter Tarnopol in My Life as a Man. In Tarnopol, who is a writer, Philip Roth has drawn the authentic American Jewish non-Jew, a character with remnants of a Jewish past, but no Jewish concerns. Unlike previous Roth protagonists, whose relation to Judaism is the familiar dialectical one of the challenger, Tarnopol, who spends the spring and summer of 1967 “considering what has become of his life,” is merely oblivious. Now, no Jew in the spring and summer of 1967, unless lost among the Bushmen, or lost to the Jews, could have suffered a merely personal anguish, even one so exquisite and exclusive as Tarnopol’s. That Tarnopol is intended to be Jewish we know from passing references and sociological hints—his first novel, A Jewish Father, has its setting in Germany!—but though he harps on his sense of isolation from an “increasingly chaotic America,” toward the Jews he is completely indifferent.
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The ground that Tarnopol—and Roth—have vacated, however, may be the very territory that a new group of American Jewish writers is staking out for itself. In much the same way that the financial and social security achieved by the second immigrant generation has permitted its children, when so inclined, to turn back to their “roots,” so the commercial and critical success of the second literary generation, which has affirmed the legitimate presence of Jews in American literature, now invites the Jewish writer to turn inward if he wishes. Having no longer to defend themselves from real or imagined charges of parochialism, the new Jewish writers of the 70’s are freer to explore the “tribal” and particularistic aspects of Judaism, and even, turning the tables, to speculate on the restrictive limits of English as a literary language. Here the ethnic label fits more comfortably, for these are writers who self-consciously define themselves as Jews and attempt to express their artistic vision in Jewish terms. Their interest is not in the sociological or even the psychological legacy of a Jewish background, but in the national design and religious destiny of Judaism, in its workable myths. No longer content “to draw on the interest of what was put into the bank long ago by others” (to quote Norma Rosen again), they attempt to draw directly from Jewish sources and out of Jewish culture an image of an alternative civilization.
The self-styled spokesman and most audacious writer of this movement is Cynthia Ozick, who first presented her program at the America-Israel Dialogue of 1970, announcing that American Jewry was moving “Toward Yavneh,” that is to say, toward the creation of an indigenously Jewish culture in the English language. Despite an almost complete lack of supportive evidence, Miss Ozick foretold the emergence of a new kind of literature as part of this general cultural renaissance: “A liturgical literature [which] has the configuration of the ram’s horn: you give your strength to the inch-hole and the splendor spreads wide.” The image of the shofar, or ram’s horn, redolent of biblical history and the most awesome moments of the High Holy Days, was meant to discredit all those universalist Jews who had been blowing into the wrong end: George Steiner for glorifying the Exile as “an arena for humankind’s finest perceptions”; Philip Roth for his protest, “I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew”; Allen Ginsberg with his loud persuasion that religions are “allee samee.” As against these, Miss Ozick argued that nothing produced by Jews in the Diaspora had lasted except that which was “centrally Jewish,” particularistic and narrow in creative inception; and only that would survive which was written in a Jewish tongue. Her most highly charged—and correspondingly imprecise—remarks concerned the emergence in America of just such a new language, a Judeo-English, or “New Yiddish,” the beginnings of which, she said, literate Jews were speaking and writing even now. The holy sparks struck in this new tongue would be the American Jewish literature of lasting merit.
The poetic sweep of these comments was more in the nature of visionary prophecy than of critical analysis, but the fiction produced by Cynthia Ozick in the intervening years provides more substantial evidence for her claims. Her most effective stories and novellas are not only steeped in internal Jewish life and lore to a degree that sets them apart from the work of her contemporaries and predecessors; they are actually Jewish assaults on fields of Gentile influence.
In the title story of her first collection, The Pagan Rabbi, a brilliant talmudist falls in love with the world of nature, and, feeling the agony of separation so acutely, he hangs himself to effect a pantheistic reunion. The notes and letter that he leaves behind offer eloquent testimony to the pagan ideal of freedom and passionately declare the pleasures of natural loveliness, but the story is on the side of his pious widow who damns them utterly with the biblical term, “abominations.” Into the mouth of the errant rabbi the author has put part of her own aestheticist longing, raising worship of the beautiful to the highest philosophic and religious pitch, but only to oppose it finally, almost pitilessly, in the name of religious values.
The story, though written in English, bears significantly on Jewish literature in both Yiddish and Hebrew. One of the most pervasive subjects of the modern Yiddish and Hebrew literary tradition is the rediscovery of those natural human instincts which would free the dust-choked ghetto Jew from the stifling repressions of halakhah and religious inhibitions. In the works of Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Bialik, Feierberg, and Tchernikhowsky, the physical world of sun, storm, trees, and rivers provides a model of freedom counterposed to the self-denial of shtetl culture. The pagan rabbi of Miss Ozick’s story, shaped by that same talmudic culture but inhabiting the contemporary world, sees in nature not a necessary corrective but a competing force that commands an allegiance as fierce as God’s. Her story unmasks the ideal of beauty and shows it to be, for the Jew, a force as destructive as any the “Gentile” world can offer.
Jewish vulnerability to Gentile standards is also the subject of a second story, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” a masterpiece of contemporary fiction.1 Through the frustrations of an aging Yiddish poet, the story details the humiliating effect of America and American values on a once-fertile culture. The English language, by bestowing fame on some (through translation), and oblivion on others, decrees who shall live and who shall die. The Yiddish writer, forever doomed to servitude amid plenty, is frozen in an attitude of envy toward those who, through the magic of translation, achieve success in an alien world. Although the story’s detailed description of the Yiddish literary milieu is as authentic as gossip, its subject is the dead-serious one of a culture that must pay constant tribute to English hegemony or lose its children and all its future.
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The struggle against the assaults and seductions of the Gentile world continues to absorb Cynthia Ozick in her latest collection of fiction, Bloodshed and Three Novellas.2 Three of the four novellas here are directly about that confrontation, and though free of the actual “bloodshed” promised by the book’s title, do throb with ominous intensity.
The first story, “A Mercenary,” introduces Lushinski, a Polish Jew by birth, now a citizen and the UN representative of a tiny African nation, and a permanent resident of New York. Lushinski’s prodigious services and warm attachments to other cultures, African and American, are stimulated by the stark fear of his own Jewish identity, but his mistress, whom he calls a German countess, and his UN assistant, a true African by the name of Morris Ngambe, have little difficulty penetrating the ironic mask of the intellectual and exposing the vulnerable Jew, the potential victim, beneath. In the title story, “Bloodshed,” a Jewish fund-raiser visits his distant relative in a newly established hasidic community outside New York. Suspicious of fraudulence in others, he is forced, during the course of an interview with the rebbe, to acknowledge his own deceit and his own demonic capacities. “An Education,” the earliest and the least successful of the four novellas, is a heavily ironic treatment of a prize student who tries, and fails, to understand life by the same ideal systems of grammar and definition that can be used in Latin declension. In the last novella, “Usurpation,” the protagonist-narrator is a Jewish writer identifiable with the author herself. With disturbing unreserve, the writer-narrator covets, appropriates, and then corrupts the work of others in her own need to make a perfect story and to win the “magic crown” of fame and immortality.
The unsettling effect of both action and style in this last story is deliberate. The novella blurs the normal lines of demarcation between fact and fiction: the narrator tells us that she attended a public reading by a famous author and heard him read a story that she felt to be “hers”; then gives us the plot of a recently published story by Bernard Malamud that the knowledgeable reader would recognize as his; then changes the ending of the Malamud story and proceeds to find the “real persons” on whom the story was presumably based, as well as the unpublished manuscripts of its main character. In questionable taste, Miss Ozick also incorporates into her novella another story, which she uses as a literary foil, an actual work that she had seen in manuscript (it was subsequently published in Response magazine) by a young writer with a less secure reputation than Malamud’s. On this story too she builds her own, in a candid act of plagiarism.
The novella, which freely reworks and passes comment on the works of other writers, is intended to undermine the act of fiction as process and as product. To deflate the mystique of the artist, Miss Ozick presents “herself” as a selfish and somewhat nasty finagler. In place of the grand notions of creativity, she gives us the petty emotions and treacherous techniques, the false bottoms and promises that produce the illusion of fictional magic.
But this act, the “Usurpation” of “Other Peoples’ Stories,” to use the double title of the novella, is only the lower manifestation of a higher, more significant act of false appropriation to which Miss Ozick wishes to draw attention. The thoroughly Jewish concern of this work is the writing of fiction itself, in Miss Ozick’s view an inheritance from the Gentiles and by nature an idolatrous activity. Art—in the Western tradition of truth to fiction as its own end—is against the Second Commandment, she says, and anti-Jewish in its very impulse. As a Jewish artist, Miss Ozick undertakes to subvert the aesthetic ideal by demonstrating its corrupting and arrogant presumption to truth. Thus, the Hebrew poet Saul Tchernikhowsky, one of those who worshipped at the shrine of pagan freedom and natural beauty, finds himself, at the end of the novella, caged in Paradise before a motto that teaches: “All that is not Law is levity.” Like the pious widow who hardened her heart against the pagan rabbi, the Jewish artist must refuse and denounce the allure of art.
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It is not unusual in modern fiction for a story or novel to question its premises without giving them up. Bloodshed, however, commits an act of self-destruction. Like a prizefighter who cannot stop punching at the signal of the bell, Miss Ozick adds a preface to her four novellas to push her meaning home. It is she herself who “explains” her final story, reducing it like a tendentious reviewer to a moral function:
“Usurpation” is a story written against story-writing; against the Muse-goddesses; against Apollo. It is against magic and mystification, against sham and “miracle,” and, going deeper into the dark, against idolatry. It is an invention directed against inventing—the point being that the story-making faculty itself can be a corridor to the corruptions and abominations of idol-worship, of the adoration of magical event.
The preface tells us when the stories were written, why they have been included here, what they are about. This is not footnoting, like Eliot’s notes to “The Waste Land” to which the author ingenuously compares it, but self-justification and special pleading.
The preface betrays the insecurities of both the artist and the Jew. Though she admires the transforming, magical kind of art, Miss Ozick is, in fact, an intellectual writer whose works are the fictional realization of ideas. Her reader is expected, at the conclusion of her stories, to have an insight, to understand the point of events rather than to respond to their affective power. Miss Ozick has publicly regretted this quality of hers, and accused herself of lacking what George Eliot calls “truth of feeling.” It is true that, marvelously imaginative as she is with words and ideas, Miss Ozick is not on the whole successful at creating autonomous characters whose destiny will tantalize or move the reader.
Because she is a Jewish writer who prides herself on the “centrally Jewish” quality of her work, Miss Ozick has hit a curious snag here. The writer who can achieve “truth of feeling” produces universal art whatever the ethnic stuff of his subject, but a writer of ideas requires a community of knowledge and shared cultural assumptions. In her preface, Miss Ozick says she has to explain the meaning of “Usurpation” because a certain non-Jewish critic had failed to understand it. This failure she attributes not to the story’s possible artistic shortcomings, but to its Jewish specificity, which puts it outside the critic’s cultural range: “I had written ‘Usurpation’ in the language of a civilization that cannot understand its thesis.” As the prophet of an indigenous Jewish culture in the English language, she might have been expected to hail the critic’s failure to understand as a milestone—an authentic breakthrough in the creation of a distinctive Jewish literature. Instead, determined to have both the cake and the eating of it, she anxiously becomes her own translator, explaining Tchernikhowsky, Torah, the large ideas as well as the factual underpinnings of her work. If her kind of art is not inherently universal, she is apparently prepared to provide “art with an explanation” in order to spread the splendor wide.
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Saving herself from a lonely ethnic fate, Miss Ozick appears in the preface not simply as an author but as cultural impresario of a new Jewish literature in America. Elsewhere, in book reviews, letters-to-the-editor, and public appearances like the America-Israel Dialogue of 1970, she has launched a veritable campaign to promote the idea of a Jewish literary community with meaningful ties to the past, to Israel, and to Jewish literature in Jewish languages. The thrust of this campaign is the Judaization of English, not only for the small community of Jews but for the wider world, so that Jewish writers may create their own literature and still hope to overcome the natural barriers of distinctiveness and particularism.
Aside from the difficulty of knowing, at this point in its development, just what, specifically, a “Jewish” literature in English would look like, one may ask why any Jewish writer with access to English should want to risk a parochial fate when even Miss Ozick, keeping an anxious eye on the reviewers, has shown herself to have second thoughts on the subject. Nor is her fortification of art by advertising a reassuring sign of confidence in her project. Still, the reach of Jewish literature in English in the direction she proposes, though modest, has been noticeable in recent years. Thus, Arthur A. Cohen’s ambitious novel, In the Days of Simon Stern, offers a contemporary interpretation of the traditional Jewish motif of the messianic coming, and does so in what might be called a midrashic mode of writing, one in which a familiar story or theme is given a new reading. This kind of fiction has the difficult task of applying a pattern without mechanical strain, and of revitalizing the familiar without diminishing it. The Rape of Tamar, by Dan Jacobson, and The Sacrifice, a study of an Abraham figure by the Canadian Jewish novelist Adele Wiseman, are two very different works in the same mode.
The fiction of Hugh Nissenson, likewise occasionally written in this midrashic manner, concerns the most sensitive areas of Jewish life. In his earlier stories, collected in the volumes A Pile of Stones and In the Reign of Peace, Nissenson explored the ironic relation between “Diaspora” and “homeland,” the distance between the Jew as innocent victim of history and the Jew as self-determining Israeli, prepared to shape history to his design. His stories were fine as exempla, though as fiction often guilty of “forcing the end,” of imposing their moral design upon the characters in the same way that the extremists in Nissenson’s stories violently force their impatient will upon the course of events.
His just-published first novel, My Own Ground,3 gets deeper into the stuff of morality. The book is written in the form of a memoir by one Jacob Brody, who at the alleged time of composition, 1965, is settled safely in Elmira, New York; in his memoir Jake goes back some fifty years to his adolescent struggle as an immigrant on the Lower East Side for something he could identify as “my own ground.” Jake does not plunge into the heart of the action, but learns what he can from the sidelines, keeping eyes and ears wide open—there has seldom been so observant a character. He pieces together an education based on “street-savvy,” the socio-political arguments of the day, and the religious persuasions of an earlier day, but all this is subject to the mythic structures that are the real determining forces of life.
Each of the major figures in this book—Schlifka the pimp, Miriam Tauber the landlady, Roman Osipovich Kagan the Marxist, and Hannah Isaacs, the girl whose fate determines the plot—is haunted and driven by a personal myth, a single remembered event or dream of his or her past. Before the coming to America was the brutalizing experience of Europe: the men were shaped by its distorted images of power; the women by distorted images of sex. The interacting forces represented by these four lives help to fashion the “myth,” or determining story, of Jake, who becomes neither like the selfless hero Kagan nor like the sadistic exploiter Schlifka, but does his human duty as a man and stakes out a modest claim. Though paved not with gold, but with shards of brown glass, the streets of America are all the holy ground there is.
The main plot of the book, however, concerns Hannah, the only child of a fiercely pious rabbi who would never touch his daughter because she had irregular periods. Once, when her father knew she was menstruating and saw her watering some flowers in the garden, he shouted out the window, “Don’t! Do you want to poison them? You’ll kill them.” Though no causal connection is drawn between her father’s strictures and Hannah’s perverse sexual inclinations, it is clear that her attraction to Schlifka the pimp, the masochistic pleasure she takes in his torture and abuse of her, have their roots in her father’s sanctified rejection of her sexuality. At a moment when she might have been saved, she is once more denied by Kagan, the revolutionary, in the name of higher Marxist ideals, and since these three—the pimp, the holy Marxist, and the holy Jew represented by her father—are her only choices, she is led, seemingly inevitably, to suicide.
Jake’s knowledge of the evil done to women, including a piercing memory of his mother’s death in childbirth, is furthered by the landlady who is pursued by a haunting reminder of original female sin very similar to Hannah’s. Although Jake participates only tangentially in the lives of these women, he feels guilty by implication, and tries to atone for the wrongs that others have committed against them. The heavy moral charge of the book consequently lacks proper focus; since Jake has to expiate sins he did not commit in a world he never made, his own final absolution, his finding of his own ground, is not really satisfactory, either from a narrative or from a moral point of view.
This fictional memoir is nevertheless more than a corrective for false nostalgia about the immigrant Jewish past. The book suggests the collective unconscious of American Jewry, the repressed trauma of its passage from the old world to the new. Yet Nissenson’s version of this Jewish unconscious seems strangely beholden to the ideas of the Women’s Lib movement, way beyond the point of mere distortion. In this sense My Own Ground serves as another necessary reminder that the “centrally Jewish” writer is still under the influence of an American culture which is much more powerful than his own.
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To distinguish between a kind of American Jewish writing that may be on its way out, and one that may be on its way in, is not to make any statement of relative value, but simply to point out the difference between writers who have all along insisted they belong to the Anglo-American tradition, though their heritage be Jewish, and writers who self-consciously place themselves within a Jewish cultural sphere, though their language is English. Perhaps a modest example can illustrate the point.
Cynthia Ozick’s title story, “Bloodshed,” bears a remarkable resemblance to Philip Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic,” the most “Jewish” story in his 1959 collection, Goodbye, Columbus. In both of these fictional confrontations between a secularized American Jew and an old-country believer, the moral scales are tipped in favor of the latter, not merely for his wry intelligence and personal courage, but also for his having survived the Holocaust. In both works the protagonist capitulates to this superior moral force, admits the relative hollowness of his own comfortable existence, and recognizes, even if he cannot accept, the elevated spiritual situation of the other.
The differences between Roth and Ozick start in their choice of locale. Roth’s Eli Peck is a young lawyer in Woodenton, an American suburb where Jews are resolutely, though not yet comfortably, indistinguishable from their Gentile neighbors; into this suburb Rabbi Tsuref comes as a stranger to remind its Jews of something valuable they have lost. Cynthia Ozick’s Bleilip, on the other hand, also a lawyer, takes a Greyhound bus out of New York to reach his destination, a small, self-contained hasidic community where he is the only stranger. Through this artificial device (there is no practical reason for Bleilip to have made the trip), Miss Ozick transports her character into a traditional Jewish environment which then authorizes, and, in fact, demands ongoing references to an internal Jewish world in which the Americanized Bleilip is at a cultural disadvantage. As against Roth’s use of the shorthand symbol of a secure religious tradition to expose the social and psychological insecurity of a modern Jewish community, Miss Ozick portrays a real-life situation in which issues of faith and doubt, foreign to the skeptical Bleilip, are taken seriously and are seen to have consequences.
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Paradoxically, however, it is Philip Roth and not Cynthia Ozick, or Hugh Nissenson, who can best afford to write about the American Jewish reality. For American Jews today in their numbers live not on Nissenson’s Lower East Side or in Ozick’s hasidic shtetl, but in “Woodenton,” the home of Eli Peck. With no desire (to put it mildly) to do “public relations” for Judaism or the Jews, Philip Roth has been free to draw from his observation and experience whatever they may yield. For those, by contrast, who take Judaism seriously as a cultural alternative, and wish to weave new brilliant cloth from its ancient threads, the sociological reality of the present-day American Jewish community would seem to present an almost insurmountable obstacle. Writers like Ozick and Nissenson, who feel the historic, moral, and religious weight of Judaism, and want to represent it in literature, have had to ship their characters out of town by Greyhound or magic carpet, to an unlikely shtetl, to Israel (the scene of many of Nissenson’s stories in his previous collections), to other times and other climes, in search of pan-Jewish fictional atmospheres. In the meantime the actual world of American Jews has lent itself to the production of satire, but not so far to any nobler art.
1 First published in COMMENTARY, November 1969.
2 Knopf, 178 pp., $6.95.
3 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 182 pp., $7.95.